Ceramics and glass business news of the week

Ceradyne Inc., a 3M company, received a contract modification worth $34 million from the U.S. Army to provide 28,000 pieces of body armor under the Soldier Protection Systems Vital Torso Protection program for lightweight enhanced small arms protective inserts.

Fuyao Glass America is expanding its presence in the Dayton region even before its first product comes off the assembly line. The company will add about 180,000 square feet to its existing 1.4 million-square-foot facility, officials say. This would bump the total size of the operation here to nearly 1.6 million square feet. That includes a 90,000-square-foot addition for warehousing and a nearly 90,000-square-foot addition for warehousing and production.

The ACI Foundation, a non-profit subsidiary of the American Concrete Institute, has announced the formation of the Daniel W. Falconer Memorial Fellowship, created in honor of the late Dan Falconer, FACI, who passed away July 29, 2015, after a courageous battle with cancer. This new fellowship will be awarded to graduate students studying in the field of structural engineering with an emphasis in reinforced concrete design, and will be funded through the generosity of friends and colleagues.

Italy’s ceramics sector is set to expand by 4% due to fueling of exports and an expected turnover of about $5.5 billion, according to its main business association, Confindustria Ceramica. “The most dynamic part of the market is exports, which now amount to over 80% of turnover and were worth 2.23 billion euros in the first six months of the year,” said Confindustria Ceramica President Emilio Mussini.

A state-of-the-art facility that is set to drive global developments in structural ceramic materials and technology has been officially opened by Morgan Advanced Materials. Morgan’s second Global Materials Centre of Excellence is located at the company’s manufacturing facility in Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire. Employing a dedicated team of materials specialists and design engineers, the multi-million pound facility will be responsible for the development of new materials technologies for applications in sectors as diverse as aerospace, medical and the environment.

U.S. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory has created two new collaborative centers that provide an innovative pathway for business and industry to access Argonne’s unparalleled scientific resources to address the nation’s energy and national security needs. These centers will help speed discoveries to market to ensure U.S. industry maintains a lead in this global technology race.

An ambitious Pacific Rim trade deal anchored by the U.S. promises to boost the economies of its 12 participating countries by opening their markets to one another, but not all the gains will be spread evenly. Among the biggest winners of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is Vietnam. Experts say Japanese car and auto parts makers and Malaysia’s electronics and semiconductor industry will also benefit from the trade deal, which was agreed on Monday after more than five years of negotiations.

NIST and NSF announced that the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will lead a consortium to identify new and emerging areas of advanced manufacturing that would benefit from shared public-private investment in research and development, education and training. The consortium, called MForesight: the Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight, will provide a channel for industrial, academic, and other private-sector input on manufacturing priorities.